Greater Britain

CHAPTER X.

UMRITSUR

AT Umbala, I heard that the Sikh pilgrims returning from the sacred fair, or great Hindoo camp-meeting, at Hurdwar, had been attacked by cholera, and excluded from the town; and as I quitted Umbala in the evening, I came upon the cholera-stricken train of pilgrims escaping by forced marches toward their homes, in many cases a thousand miles away. Tall, lithe, long-bearded men with large hooked noses, high foreheads, and thin lips, stalked along, leading by one hand their veiled women, who ran behind, their crimson and orange trowsers stained with the dust of travel, while bullock-carts decked out with jingling bells bore the tired and the sick. Many children of all ages were in the throng. For mile after mile I drove through their ranks, as they marched with a strange kind of weary haste, and marched, too, with few halts, with little rest, if any. One great camp we left behind us, but only one; and all night long we were still passing ranks of marching men and women. The march was silent; there was none of the usual chatter of an Indian crowd; gloom was in every face, and the people marched like a beaten army flying from a destroying foe.

The disease, indeed, was pressing on their heels. Two hundred men and women, as I was told at the Umbala lines, had died among them in the single day. Many had dropped from fright alone, but the pestilence was in the horde, and its seeds were carried into whatever villages the pilgrims reached.

The gathering at Hurdwar had been attended by a million people drawn from every part of the Punjaub and Northwest; not only Hindoos and Sikhs, but Scindhees, Beloochees, Pathans, and Afghans had their representatives in this great throng. As we neared the bridge of boats across the Sutlej, I found that a hurried quarantine had been set up on the spot. Only the sick or dying and bearers of corpses were detained, however; a few questions were asked of the remainder, and ultimately they were allowed to cross; but driving on at speed, I reached Jullundur in the morning, only to find that the pilgrims had been denied admittance to the town. A camp had been formed without the city, to which the pilgrims had to go, unless they preferred to straggle on along the roads, dropping and dying by the way; and the villagers throughout the country had risen on the wretched people, to prevent them returning to their homes.

It is not strange that the government of India should lately have turned its attention to the regulation or suppression of these fairs, for the city-dwelling people of North India will not continue long to tolerate enormous gatherings at the commencement of the hot weather, by which the lives of thousands must ultimately be lost. At Hurdwar, at Juggernauth, and at many other holy spots, hundreds of thousands – millions, not unfrequently – are collected yearly from all parts of India. Great princes come down traveling slowly from their capitals with trains of troops and followers so long that they often take a day or more to pass a given spot. The Maharajah of Cashmere‘s camp between Kalka and Umbala occupied when I saw it more space than that of Aldershot. Camels, women, sutlers without count, follow in the train, so that a body of five thousand men is multiplied until it occupies the space and requires the equipments of a vast army. A huge multitude of cultivators, of princes, of fakeers, and of roisterers met for the excitement and the pleasures of the camp is gathered about the holy spot. There is religion, and there is trade; indeed, the religious pilgrims are for the most part shrewd traders, bent on making a good profit from their visit to the fair.

The gathering at Hurdwar in 1867 had been more than usually well attended and successful, when suddenly a rumor of cholera was heard; the police procured the break-up of the camp, and government thought fit to prohibit the visit to Simla of the Maharajah of Cashmere. The pilgrims had hardly left the camp upon their journey home when cholera broke out, and by the time I passed them hundreds were already dead, and a panic had spread through India. The cholera soon followed the rumor, and spread even to the healthiest hill-towns, and 6000 deaths occurred in the city of Srinuggur, after the Maharajah‘s return with his infected escort from Hurdwar. A government which has checked infanticide and suppressed suttee could not fail to succeed, if it interfered, in causing these fairs to be held in the cold weather.

At Jullundur I encountered a terrible dust-storm. It came from the south and west, and, to judge from its fierceness, must have been driven before the wind from the great sandy desert of Northern Scinde. The sun was rising for a sultry day, when from the south there came a blast which in a minute covered the sky with a leaden cloud, while from the horizon there advanced, more slowly, a lurid mass of reddish-brown. It soon reached the city, and then, from the wall where I sought shelter, nothing could be seen but driving sand of ocher color, nothing heard but the shrieking of the wind. The gale ceased as suddenly as it began, but left a day which, delightful to travelers upon the Indian plains, would elsewhere have been called by many a hard name – a day of lowering sky and dropping rain, with chilling cold – in short, a day that felt and looked like an English thaw, though the thermometer must have stood at 75°. Another legacy from the storm was a view of the Himalayas such as is seldom given to the dwellers on the plains. Looking at the clouds upon the northern horizon, I suddenly caught sight of the Snowy Range hanging, as it seemed, above them, half-way up the skies. Seen with a foreground of dawk jungle in bright bloom, the scene was beautiful; but the view too distant to be grand, except through the ideas of immensity called up by the loftiness of the peaks. While crossing the Beeas (the ancient Hyphasis, and eastern boundary of the Persian empire in the days of Darius), as I had crossed the Sutlej, by a bridge of boats, I noticed that the railway viaduct, which was being built for the future Umritsur and Delhi line, stood some way from the deep water of the river; indeed, stood chiefly upon dry land. The rivers change their course so often that the Beeas and Sutlej bridges will each have to be made a mile long. There has lately been given us in the Punjaub a singular instance of the blind confidence in which government orders are carried out by the subordinates. The order was that the iron columns on which the Beeas bridge was to rest should each be forty-five feet long. In placing them, in some cases the bottom of the forty-five feet was in the shifting sand – in others, it was thirty feet below the surface of the solid rock; but a boring which was needless in the one case and worse than useless in the other has been persevered in to the end, the story runs, because it was the “hook‘m.” The Indian rivers are the great bars to road and railway making; indeed, except on the Grand Trunk road, it may be said that the rivers of India are still unbridged. On the chief mail-roads stone causeways are built across the river-beds, but the streams are all-but impassable during the rains. Even on the road from Kalka to Umbala, however, there is one river-bed without a causeway, across which the dawk-gharree is dragged by bullocks, who struggle slowly through the sand; and, in crossing it, I saw a steam-engine lying half buried in the drift.

In India, we have been sadly neglectful of the roads. The Grand Trunk road and the few great railroads are the only means of communication in the country. Even between the terminus of the Bengal lines at Jubbelpore and of the Bombay railroad at Nagpore there was at the time of my visit no metaled road, although the distance was but 200 miles, and the mails already passed that way. Half a day at least was lost upon all the Calcutta letters, and Calcutta passengers for Bombay or England were put to an additional expense of some £30 and a loss of a week or ten days in time from the absence of 200 miles of road. Until we have good cross-roads in India, and metaled roads into the interior from every railway station, we shall never succeed in increasing the trade of India, nor in civilizing its inhabitants. The Grand Trunk road is, however, the best in the world, and is formed of soft white nodules, found in beds through North India, which when pounded and mixed with water is known as “kunkur,” and makes a road hard, smooth, clean, and lasting, not unlike to that which asphalt gives.

At Umritsur I first found myself in the true East – the East of myrtles, roses, and veiled figures with flashing eyes – the East of the “Arabian Nights” and “Lalla Rookh.” The city itself is Persian, rather than Indian, in its character, and is overgrown with date-palms, pomegranates, and the roses from which the precious attar is distilled. Umritsur has the making of the attar for the world, and it is made from a rose which blossoms only once a year. Ten tons of petals of the ordinary country rose (Rosa centifolia) are used annually in attar-making at Umritsur, and are worth from £20 to £30 a ton in the raw state. The petals are placed in the retort with a small quantity of water, and heat is applied until the water is distilled through a hollow bamboo into a second vessel, which contains sandal-wood oil. A small quantity of pure attar passes with the water into the receiver. The contents of the receiver are then poured out, and allowed to stand till the attar rises to the surface, in small globules, and is skimmed off. The pure attar sells for its weight in silver.

Umritsur is famous for another kind of merchandise more precious even than the attar. It is the seat of the Cashmere shawl trade, and three great French firms have their houses in the town, where, through the help of friends, shawls may be obtained at singularly low prices; but travelers in far-off regions are often in the financial position of the Texan hunter who was offered a million of acres for a pair of boots – they “have not got the boots.”

It is only shawls of the second class that can be bought cheap at Umritsur; those of the finest quality vary in price from £40 to £250, £30 being the cost of the material. The shawl manufacture of the Punjaub is not confined to Umritsur; there are 900 shawl-making shops in Loodiana, I was told while there. There are more than sixty permanent dyes in use at the Umritsur shawl-shops; cochineal, indigo, log-wood, and saffron are the commonest and best. The shawls are made of the down which underlies the hair of the “shawl-goat” of the higher levels. The yak, the camel, and the dog of the Himalayas, all possess this down as well as their hair or wool; it serves them as a protection against the winter cold. Chogas– long cloaks used as dressing-gowns by Europeans – are also made in Umritsur, from the soft wool of the Bokhara camel, for Umritsur is now the headquarters of the Central Asian trade with Hindostan.

The bazaar is the gayest and most bustling in India – the goods of all India and Central Asia are there. Dacca muslin – known as “woven air” – lies side by side with thick chogas of kinkob and embroidered Cashmere, Indian towels of coarse huckaback half cover Chinese watered silks, and the brilliant dyes of the brocades of Central India are relieved by the modest grays of the soft puttoo caps. The buyers are as motley as the goods – Rajpoots in turbans of deep blue, ornamented with gold thread, Cashmere valley herdsmen in strange caps, nautch girls from the first three bridges of Srinuggur, some of the so-called “hill-fanatics,” whose only religion is to levy contributions on the people of the plains, and Sikh troopers, home on leave, stalking through the streets with a haughty swagger. Some of the Sikhs wear the pointed helmets of their ancestors, the ancient Sakæ; but, whether he be helmeted or not, the enormous white beard of the Sikh, the fierce curl of his mustache, the cock of the turban, and the amplitude of his sash, all suggest the fighting-man. The strange closeness of the likeness of the Hungarians to the Sikhs would lead one to think that the races are identical. Not only are they alike in build, look, and warlike habits, but they brush their beards in the same fashion, and these little customs endure longer than manners – longer, often, than religion itself. One of the crowd was a ruddy-faced, red-bearded, Judas-haired fellow, that looked every inch a Fenian, and might have stepped here from the Kilkenny wilds; but the majority of the Sikhs had aquiline noses and fine features, so completely Jewish of the best and oldest type that I was reminded of Sir William Jones‘s fanciful derivation of the Afghan races from the lost Ten Tribes of Israel. It may be doubted whether the Sikhs, Afghans, Persians, ancient Assyrians, Jews, ancient Scythians, and Magyars were not all originally of one stock.

In India, dress still serves the purpose of denoting rank. The peasant is clothed in cotton, the prince in cloth of gold; and even religion, caste, and occupation are distinguished by their several well-known and unchanging marks. Indeed, the fixity of fashion is as singular in Hindostan as its infinite changeableness in New York or France. The patterns we see to-day in the Bombay bazaar are those which were popular in the days of Shah Jehan. This regulation of dress by custom is one of the many difficulties in the way of our English manufacturers in their Indian ventures. There has been an attempt made lately to bring about the commercial annexation of India to England: Lancashire is to manufacture the Longee, Dhotee, and Saree, we are told; Nottingham or Paisley are to produce us shumlas; Dacca is to give way to Norwich, and Coventry to supersede Jeypoor. It is strange that men of Indian knowledge and experience should be found who fail to point out the absurdity of our entertaining hopes of any great trade in this direction. The Indian women of the humbler castes are the only customers we can hope to have in India; the high-caste people wear only ornamented fabrics, in the making of which native manufacturers have advantages which place them out of the reach of European competition: cheap labor; workmen possessed of singular culture, and of a grace of expression which makes their commonest productions poems in silk and velvet; perfect knowledge of their customers’ wants and tastes; scrupulous regard to caste conservatism – all these are possessed by the Hindoo manufacturer, and absent in the case of the firms of Manchester and Rochdale. As a rule, all Indian dress is best made by hand; only the coarsest and least ornamented fabrics can be largely manufactured at paying rates in England. As for the clothing of the poorer people, the men for the most part wear nothing, the women little, and that little washed often, and changed never. Even for the roughest goods we cannot hope to undersell the native manufacturers by much in the presidency towns. Up country, if we enter into the competition, it can scarcely fail to be a losing one. England is not more unlikely to be clothed from India than India from Great Britain. If European machinery is needed, it will be erected in Yokohama, or in Bombay, not in the West Riding.

It is hardly to be believed that Englishmen have for some years been attempting to induce the natives to adopt our flower patterns – peonies, butterflies, and all. Ornament in India is always subordinate to the purpose which the object has to serve. Hindoo art begins where English ends. The principles which centuries of study have given us as the maxims upon which the grammar of ornament is based are those which are instinctive in every native workman. Every costume, every vase, every temple and bazaar in India, gives eye-witness that there is truth in the saw that the finest taste is consistent with the deepest slavery of body, with the utmost slavishness of mind. A Hindoo of the lowest caste will spurn the gift of a turban or a loin-cloth the ornamentation of which consists not with his idea of symmetry and grace. Nothing could induce a Hindoo to clothe himself in such a gaudy, masquerading dress as maddens a Maori with delight and his friends with jealousy and mortification. In art as in deportment, the Hindoo loves harmony and quiet; and dress with the Oriental is an art: there is as much feeling – as deep poetry – in the curves of the Hindoo Saree as in the outlines of the Taj.

Umritsur is the spiritual capital of the Sikhs, and the Durbar Temple in the center of the town is the holiest of their shrines. It stands, with the sunbeams glancing from its gilded roof, in the middle of a very holy tank, filled with huge weird fish-monsters that look as though they fed on men, and glare at you through cruel eyes.

Leaving your shoes outside the very precincts of the tank, with the police guard that we have stationed there, you skirt one side of the water, and then leave the mosaic terrace for a still more gorgeous causeway, that, bordered on either side by rows of golden lamp-supporters, carries the path across toward the rich pavilion, the walls of which are as thickly spread with gems as are those of Akbar‘s palace. Here you are met by a bewildering din, for under the inner dome sit worshipers by the score, singing with vigor the grandest of barbaric airs to the accompaniment of lyre, harp, and tomtom, while in the center, on a cushion, is a long-bearded gray old gooroo, or priest of the Sikh religion – a creed singularly pure, though little known. The effect of the scene is much enhanced by the beauty of the surrounding houses, whose oriel windows overhang the tank, that the Sikh princes may watch the evolutions of the lantern-bearing boats on nights when the temple is illuminated. When seen by moonlight, the tank is a very picture from the “Arabian Nights.”

This is a time of ferment in the Sikh religion. A carpenter named Ram Singh – a man with all that combination of shrewdness and imagination, of enthusiasm and worldliness, by which the world is governed – another Mohammed or Brigham Young, perhaps – has preached his way through the Punjaub, infusing his own energy into others, and has drawn away from the Sikh Church some hundred thousand followers – reformers – who call themselves the Kookas. These modern Anabaptists – for many are disposed to look upon Ram Singh as another John of Leyden – bind themselves by some terrible and secret oath, and the government fear that reformation of religion is to be accompanied by reformation of the State of a kind not advantageous to the English power. When Ram Singh lately proclaimed his intention of visiting the Durbar Temple, the gooroos incited the Sikh fanatics to attack his men with clubs, and the military police were forced to interfere. There is now, however, a Kooka temple at Lahore.